Focused on playing EVE the wrong way

Menu

Monthly Archives: August 2014

I finished the weekend off with my Main visiting the Hi-Sec island to run exploration sites (with no luck finding faction spawns) and my Main Alt back in the Low Sec pocket making extra bookmarks. It wasn’t about ISK, it was just making the most of the opportunity to undock and interact with the environment.

To achieve this both Toons had to clone jump to different regions. I have different bases of operation set up across Hi and Low-Sec with jump clones and stores of ships and assets to allow this. Often however I can feel disinclined to move my characters away from whatever my main focus of the month is.

I’ve felt this “anchoring” around many aspects of the game – Trade, PI and BPO Research stand out, where moving a character away halts or impacts the function they were being utilised for. The most obvious response to that is training up Alts.

My biggest anchors however are my +5 empire training clones. Every time I step out of them I see my skill training time increase by a noticeable amount, so I feel a subconscious desire to stay using them for as much as possible.

I have spent a lot of time and ISK setting things up so that I can flitter from one side of the galaxy to the other doing as many different aspects of the game as I want on a whim, yet I don’t tend to end up playing the game like that.

I actually managed to log in for a Saturday morning EVE Session – although it was only half-length. It was good to be able to actually do something in space.

I’m one month into my renewed BPO research, and it has been a bit of a godsend. Between setting the POS up that I wanted, and logging in daily to keep jobs ticking over, it has generated a surprising amount of in game activity.

Over the last fortnight I’ve moved from 200 to 270 confirmed BPO being at ME/TE 10. That leaves 500 odd more to go in my collection, and a similar number donated. I have more than a year worth of POS fuel stockpiled, so I should make a hefty dent in those.

I was careful not to over research my BPO when I first got them – but I am amazed (and slightly miffed) at just how many of them were converted with Crius to ME 9 and TE 9, requiring research.

There is one noticeable negative with this activity, it makes you inclined to leave your research characters in the vicinity of the POS, which could end up stifling your game a little. To that end I am trying to do the longer research times on my Main and Main Alt, leaving the shorter jobs to my Industry Alt who is generally around the POS’s location anyway. I also used a PLEX to start dual training on one of my accounts, to get my Second Industry Alt skilled up in the same area.

Now that the Small POS is all set up, I have mostly dismantled the Medium POS. The shorter offlining and unanchoring times for many modules makes this a far less arduous chore now. I’m just waiting for the last couple BPO to come out of its Lab before putting it offline and going through the nervous process of unanchoring it.

(Some of the defense that was mounted on the Medium POS)

I have also consolidated my POS equipment, and put up for sale the unnecessary gear I gathered during this process. I’ve been rushed and short on time, and my shopping efforts reflected that. I am still annoyed at myself for how much ISK I wasted.

(I also purchased quite a lot of stuff at abnormally high prices, and will take a bath on sales. Not much use sitting on them longer term either, I’m not likely to ever recoup at those prices.)

The last thing I managed to complete over this week was to move a couple more ships into my Low Sec home. I’ve been logging in my scouting Alt every so often to look for Wormholes to empire and check how busy the systems were. Pirate activity seems to have finally started to die down so I might try to spend some time down there. Today I found a wormhole that cut the trip to my home base from 28 jumps to 12, with only 2 of them through low sec, so I moved in a PVP Frigate and a Covert Ops.

For self-preservation I’ve stayed away from the majority of the commentary deluge on Somergate 2014. I caught a couple blogs about the mechanics of it, and read the comments of a couple CSM members, but otherwise I’ve run a mile from the ranting and raving.

I’m not sure if it comes down to someone thinking they are being smart while being dumb, or someone deliberately setting fires, but either way I’m sure it will be dealt with. It doesn’t seem to be something you really need to get your knickers in a knot over – but people still are.

It has been the same since Incarna was released – vocal EVE players looking for excuses to be outraged. Ignoring the trolls, I think many of these people need to stop and ask themselves what is really driving their protests.

Unrelated, the other day Sugar Kyle remarked on the pleasure you can gain in EVE from all the necessary ground work required to play.

Another weekend passes with no opportunity to really play EVE properly.

I walked away from my desktop PC on Thursday night as it applied window updates. I returned on Friday morning to find the PC continually rebooting. It would start, indicate windows did not shutdown properly and did I want to boot into safe mode, pause for a bit, blue screen and reboot. It had been doing that continually for 6 hours straight.

Unfortunately I couldn’t boot into any of the safe modes as they all blue screened. I also didn’t have a valid repair disk for the service patch level of Windows 7. I unhooked almost all the hardware and ran memory tests, but nothing helped. Needing my desktop to work I resorted to buying a new SSD and windows 8. I hadn’t gone down the upgrade path to 8 as I really did not like Microsoft’s direction with it, but by now the third party tools to make it more useable as a desktop environment were well known.

So my Saturday EVE session was lost to re-installing a large volume of applications.

I am seeing the consequences of my extra busyness that began at the start of July. Aside 60 to 90 minutes less sleep a day, I’ve noticed I’m not finishing half my blog entries. The draft folder is quickly growing. I am going to have to try and be more succinct in my ramblings.

A little while ago the overview blog for the Hyperion release was posted.

I don’t mind the concept of most of these changes – including the impact of mass on how far ships are spat out the other end of a wormhole passage. (Sort of makes sense in a Sci-Fi movie sort of way!) Most changes appear to be adjustments to lookup tables instead of heavy code rewrites, so should be able to be tweaked.

The updates will probably make life a little more dangerous for solo or small gangs living in wormhole space and focused on PVE – given they will have a little less warning about new connections, there will generally be more connections open, and it will be more dangerous to roll holes with bigger ships. Those focused on PVP however might find it a little better.

I can’t see it encouraging new people into wormhole space – it might even have the opposite effect. Day trips however will likely go deeper and last a little longer, and I expect most inhabitants will adjust.

The bookmark changes will be useful.

New Overview setup sharing

Not a perfect implementation (I saw someone suggest something like the saved fitting functionality would be better), but it will make a huge difference for me trying to maintain the overviews of 6 characters across two accounts. I can just update my main, post a link in an alliance mail, and then update all the other characters from there. I am excited by this one; although it is probably something older players will be more enthused about.

A new kind of Level 4 missions

This one is interesting, aside the worry about having losses on your killboard as you work the missions out. I also worry that the AI will be easily farmable with certain min/max fits. Will have to see how they are in reality. It is however something I will try as a solo player, and it might even encourage a few to PVP more. I wonder why they are not doing level 1 through 4 though. Level 4 frigate combat seems odd.

Incursion Scout Sites improved to be viable for small groups

I thought this meant they might be easier for small groups. I had a momentary spike of interest – maybe I can test the incursion waters on these easy sites. Maybe I can run them with two accounts? No – they will actually be harder and required 5 people, but the more viable bit is increased rewards. Moving along…

Otherwise there wasn’t much in the blog that will impact my game. They are changing the Ishtar, Eagle and Muninn a little. I don’t fly them, and at a glance the changes won’t encourage me to. They are lowering the activation cost of 100MN Micro Warp Drives, which again won’t impact me. New Tool tips for the market might give me 3 minutes of interest. I might get another 4 minutes of interest glancing at the new EVE Store accessories – but since I don’t use the captain quarters, I can’t see myself buying any.

It was half interesting that they suggest they will allow Multiple Character training to be available through the New Eden Store. So you might be able to use up some of your Aurum on Multiple Character training. I expect people with far more knowledge than me might write some detailed blog posts on the impact on the market of that change.

So I am really looking forward to the Overview sharing, and will spent at least a few days looking at the new Level 4 missions. It could have been worse.

Character requirements: Must be between 1 month and 12 months old as of 1 Aug 2014

Ship requirements: You will need to be able to cargo scan and use combat probes (expanded probe launcher). A MWD is highly recommended. A fast ship with scanning bonuses is best – either a T1 exploration frigate or a Covops frigate.

Travel requirements: All locations are in high sec space. Due to anchoring restrictions, it will be in 0.5 – 0.7 space. It is possible that it will be shorter to travel through lowsec between locations, but it is not required. Do so at your own risk.

Rewards: Rewards will be modest. Each container will have some random exploration loot. The final container will have something useful for exploration.

I missed both my weekend EVE sessions again, which are the only time during the week I can play for a few hours without fear of interruption. While this restricted what I could do, I still ended up spending a lot more hours in game than is normal.

My BPO research continues, and will be doing so for quite some months. I am just finishing the first part of my collection, close to 200 BPO relating to consumables (ammunition and whatnot). Most of these were quick to train the gaps to get them to ME/TE 10. The process will slow down as I move into the more expensive BPO.

Since I will have the POS running for quite a while I continued the process of investigating the best one to use to cover my needs. I primarily need it to run a Design laboratory and a Research Laboratory, and until I can do my investigations, a Compression Array. I also want to be able to offline these and turn on a basic defence.

I currently have a Medium Faction Tower running, but I can get away with running a small POS. I had originally planned to use the Dark Blood Small Control Tower I already owned, and went so far as to anchor. It doesn’t however have the CPU to run the 2 labs and 1 array. (I should have foreseen that.)

The prices for Small Faction POS are currently much higher than normal and availability limited, so I ended up purchasing and anchoring a Dread Guristas Small Control Tower to use instead. This has more than enough CPU for what I need. However I couldn’t find a basic defensive setup that did what I wanted it to.

So finally I purchased a Shadow Small Control Tower and anchored that. This runs what I want it to, and will allow me to configure a suitable basic defence. (I’m under no illusion as to its ability to defend itself; this is more for amusement and inconvenience value.) I also picked up various faction POS modules to squeeze on the defence I was happy with. I now find myself with some 7 or 8 control towers.

While going through this long process – including some extended shopping trips to far flung systems to pick up some of the POS equipment, I also spent a great deal of time collecting all that POS Fuel I mentioned I purchased over the last few months. I thought that I had spent around 4B ISK on it, some for my own use, and some for speculative trading. This turned into quite a task for my risk adverse self, as it turned out to be closer to 8B ISK worth that I ended up moving in 220M and 800M ISK lots.

I will transition from my medium to small POS over the next couple weeks as some of the longer research jobs finish up.

I’ve been a bit bumbling in my approach to this. I would not normally have committed to spending so much on equipment and fuel in earlier years, but I tend to find myself a little rushed when I do get a chance to the play the game at the moment and am not as patient. I’ll have to re-sell a lot of what I have collected, and hope my actions haven’t cost myself too much.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
EVE Online and the EVE logo are the registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights are reserved worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. EVE Online, the EVE logo, EVE and all associated logos and designs are the intellectual property of CCP hf. All artwork, screenshots, characters, vehicles, storylines, world facts or other recognizable features of the intellectual property relating to these trademarks are likewise the intellectual property of CCP hf. CCP hf. has granted permission to evehermit.com to use EVE Online and all associated logos and designs for promotional and information purposes on its website but does not endorse, and is not in any way affiliated with, evehermit.com. CCP is in no way responsible for the content on or functioning of this website, nor can it be liable for any damage arising from the use of this website.